MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

May 11th, 2007

Twilight Winner and Early Bird Special

Contest veteran Yi Cao is our Twilight phase champion. He is a contest veteran, but this is his first win before Daylight. Read about his usual contest style in his entry in the list of Gerrymandering Contest Winners. In second place is newcomer Dan Kunkle (welcome!), followed by Jim Mikola, Nick Howe, and Steve Hoelzer. For complete rankings in Darkness and Twilight, see the Statistics.

The rest of the contest is in daylight and everyone can see everyone’s code. Browse through the entries submitted during Darkness and Twilight. There’s great stuff in there. When you see clever code or interesting algorithms that you’d like to recognize publicly, please post a comment.

Our next mid-contest prize, the Early Bird Special goes to the best-scoring entry submitted before 8AM EDT on Saturday. Good luck!

By Matthew Simoneau

15:15 UTC | Posted in Peg Solitaire | Permalink |

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2 Responses to “Twilight Winner and Early Bird Special”

  1. Alan Chalker replied on May 12th, 2007 at 02:43 UTC :

    For those of you interested, I’ve submitted a heavily commented version of the current leading code under the name “Guided tour of dreamland” (ID: 39727). It should be help to anyone who wants to understand exactly how what algorithms the best entries are working with.

    As I put in my comment:

    Note in the interest of collaboration I’m documenting the leading code as much as possible. Instead of going the obscufation route with this, I invite everyone to document / take credit for their particular changes as the codes get modified. At a minimum, please don’t remove the existing comments so someone doesn’t have to start from scratch on commenting updated code again

    I did put in a small algorithmic tweak to make it a bit faster, which puts it into 1st place as of 2:30AM, but I definitely can’t take credit for the bulk of the effort, which was developed back and forth between several other contestants over the course of the day.

    I hope this gesture prevents or at least delays the onset of obscufation that normally happens about now in the contest. Such obscufation makes it more challenging for new competitors to jump in and understand what’s going on.

  2. Helen Chen replied on May 12th, 2007 at 07:26 UTC :

    Thanks Alan! That is an absolutely great idea!

    Helen

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The MATLAB Programming Contest is a semi-annual competition where contestants submit MATLAB code to try to solve a challenge. For more information, see the overview.

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